Chapter 17: Van Drecht and Cecilia, Face to Face

The morning after the assembly was cold enough that the drawing room fire had been built up twice before breakfast, and still the windows wept condensation in thin vertical lines that Cecilia found, when she sat beside them with her tea, rather more interesting to look at than the garden beyond.

She had slept, which surprised her. Five hours, possibly six, which was more than she had managed after Thornfield Abbey, and less than she would have preferred, and precisely the amount that left her functional but without the useful fog that might have blunted the clarity of what she was now obliged to think about.

Lydia's account, delivered in her room at half past ten the previous evening, had been thorough. Van Drecht's evidence, as relayed by a sister whose memory for precision rivalled Cecilia's own: the Wallachian records, the 1486 minister's testimony, the clustered deaths across three countries in three distinct periods, and the Munich exsanguination of 1743 which Cecilia had already encountered in her own research and which had already done its particular damage to her composure. What Lydia had added, and what Cecilia had not possessed before, was the full span of the Van Drecht family's documentation — not a single scholar's inference but three generations of accumulated, cross-referenced, obsessively maintained record-keeping, with the confidence and the blind spots that three generations of obsession inevitably produce.